On Wed, Jun 29, 2011 at 8:10 PM, Charles Pritchard <chuck@jumis.com> wrote:
> Mozilla labs is jumping the shark, again, with a PDF rendering webapp using Canvas.
>
> http://andreasgal.com/2011/06/15/pdf-js/
>
> They have noted (as I have), that there are cases where imperative drawing of a scene can beat-out the poor performance of the browser's generalized and declarative render tree implementation.
[snip]
> Regardless, it's another very serious project, and one which is actively looking for a11y semantics to work with canvas.
I thought their accessibility plan was to use SVG?
"Canvas is our first backend. We are planning an SVG backend which
will allow search, text selection and accessibility (its also a bit
slower, so we will probably render canvas and then build an SVG DOM on
demand)."
http://andreasgal.com/2011/06/15/pdf-js/#comment-478
"Putting all this together, we currently plan on doing a fast
first-paint of pages using canvas, concurrently building an SVG
document for the page in the background, and when the SVG document is
ready, switching to that. Or if that doesn’t work well, we could
implement text-selection (and hopefully a11y) in pdf.js itself, on top
of canvas, possibly creating new web APIs along the way. Or if, say,
font loading dominates the critical path to first-paint, we might only
use SVG and forget canvas. It’s great to have these options
available."
http://blog.mozilla.com/cjones/2011/06/15/overview-of-pdf-js-guts/
--
Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis